1776

0:00:04.2 Landry Ayres: Someone open up a window and vote ‘yes’ for independency because today we are going all the way back to the Second continental Congress for the Tony Award winning musical turned film, 1776. Here with me today are three self-​proclaimed nerds of American revolutionary history, distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, David Boaz.

0:00:27.4 David Boaz: Hello.

0:00:28.5 Landry Ayres: Cato research fellow, Paul Matzko.

0:00:31.1 Paul Matzko: Hello.

0:00:31.9 Landry Ayres: And for the first time on Pop & Locke, Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute, Tim Sandefur.

0:00:39.7 Tim Sandefur: Hi.

0:00:41.9 Landry Ayres: Why do you think John Adams was chosen as the protagonist for this story of all of the people that were present at this Continental Congress and all of the important figures that had done and would go on to do amazing things, so many different votes were cast that hinged on single decisions made by single people? What was it about John Adams and his quest to get the 13 colonies to sign on to independency that makes him the protagonist we wanna follow? Is there something about the character that we’ve created over time in our national memory of him that lends itself to this role, and do you agree with what the film says about him and what he was trying to do, or do you want somebody else to be the lead?

0:01:33.7 David Boaz: I think that John Adams was the protagonist for independence and that’s what the movie is about, so that makes sense but I think it’s a surprising choice in a lot of ways because I don’t think that John Adams is really the image of John Adams in American history books. I think that we see, as John Adams said actually in real life and in the movie, they’re gonna tell the story that Ben Franklin smoked the ground and George Washington sprang up and they ran the revolution. Although I think Jefferson is also in our national mythology a part of that. To me, going through school, getting a history degree, John Adams was always sort of off to the side, and he did the Alien and Sedition Acts and he was sort of a conservative. And so I thought he never got as good a press as Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. So in that sense, it’s an interesting choice. In the moment that the movie focuses on, it certainly makes sense.

0:02:43.8 Paul Matzko: Yeah. Well, I think John Adams would agree that he didn’t get as good a press as George Washington and Ben Franklin too. Well, Adams was certainly a big protagonist in seeking independence and served on tons of committees at the Continental Congress, a point that the David McCullough biography really brings out, how incredibly active he was. And of course, compared to people like Jefferson and Franklin, he was much more active. Jefferson was silent in Congress, he really hated public speaking. He was a writer, not a speaker. And Franklin, of course, was already an older man by that time and kind of played the sage, often negotiating behind the scenes and things. So Adams becomes a really effective protagonist just because his personality was a lot more out there compared to his colleagues.

0:03:31.7 Tim Sandefur: Though, it’s worth knowing that Adams, this idea of him as obstreperous, irascible, unpopular, that’s him writing about himself after his term as president, when he is still widely regarded as one of the worst early American presidents, and was regarded so at the time because of the Alien and Sedition Acts and so on that David mentioned. At the time at the Congress, he was well respected, he did not have a reputation for being notably unpleasant to work with. It’s interesting that the filmmakers are adopting Adam’s own later view of himself but he was actually perfectly well placed and had the reputation as someone who could get stuff done at the Congress.

0:04:14.7 Landry Ayres: This does lend itself to a sort of mythologising of the founding fathers, that is interesting to me because in a sense, the movie depicts them as very human men, that it is not reverent in the sort of way that we might see them in other ways, but it is not also classically irreverent, it is not inherently mocking them as people. It does put them in a position that shows them as wise or taking a lot of care to make the decisions that we’re going into such an important time in our history. Do you think that the film does a good job of realistically depicting the power that these men exerted over the course of history or does it fall short? Beyond just these factual nitpicking inaccuracies, of which there are many for a variety of different reasons, dramatic and otherwise. I’m just curious about how you generally feel about this film because it was the thing they showed us in high school to be like, ‘Alright, well, if we’re gonna have a day off in history class, we’re watching 1776.’ And in fact, it usually ended up being three days because this is such a long movie. [chuckle]

0:05:44.8 Paul Matzko: Let me start out. Let me start the answer to that because I actually have a personal story about this because when I first saw the movie, like you, I saw it in high school and I was already big into the American Revolution by that time, really, really fascinated by it, particularly Thomas Jefferson, he’s always been a personal hero of mine. And I hated the movie. I hated it because it struck me as irreverent. You say it’s not irreverent. It seemed that way to me. There are scenes… There’s constant sex jokes and potty jokes and there’s a scene where John Adams gets into a fight with another delegate, hitting each other with their sticks, and somebody has to fire off a rifle in the Continental Congress to get them to stop fighting. It’s ridiculous. And then Thomas Jefferson can’t write the Declaration of Independence because he wants his wife. And so the way they solve this problem is by having Mrs. Jefferson, who somehow in the movie is blonde, the real Mrs. Jefferson was not blonde, show up, and once they spend the night together, now Jefferson is able to write the… And that stuff really bothered me.

0:06:45.4 Paul Matzko: Now, maybe I’ve mellowed in the past 15 or 20 years, but when I look back at it, I find that stuff amusing and cute, and I don’t think anybody is supposed to take it seriously, and it’s fine but what I have come to like about it is that they’re trying, perhaps excessively, but they’re trying to show what you said, that these were actual people who had foibles and flaws, as well as being great geniuses and having great principles, who were negotiating independence in the face of a large number of problems, not just the size of the British military that they were confronting, but the problems of slavery and internal fights between the colonies themselves and things. And there is a scene toward the end where Ben Franklin says to John Adams, ‘What are we, demigods, where we are actual people trying to solve problems one at a time?’ And that comes up right after the discussion of slavery, which is very fitting. So I did think that it was irrelevant, I didn’t like it when I first saw it, and now I see a real charm to it, that like I said, maybe I’ve mellowed over the years.

0:07:49.4 Tim Sandefur: There is this… I like the idea that the primary hurdle to the declaration was that all these members of Congress were horny AF, they just…

[laughter]

0:08:00.4 Tim Sandefur: That’s the big barrier. Now, Benjamin Franklin had a well-​earned reputation for affairs with ladies in France and the US, his comments on older women are… They’re still… You see them pop up in textbooks. He was a randy man but the show plays up everywhere… They play up this idea, everyone is constantly, ‘Where’s my wife? Where’s my wife?’ The well-​endowed ladies, and the FFV song by Richard Henry Lee. So the movie plays up the kind of appetites of all the members of Congress, so you have… They’re all horny, they’re drunks, they’re just indulging in food, and there’s the whole bit with the delegate who doesn’t wanna be pulled away from his supper, which again goes to, I think, Timothy’s point about showing them as real people. I will say that the part of it that bothers me more… Fine, that’s all exaggerated, Hopkins was not a drunk, there was no necessary licentiousness in a number of the men who are portrayed in here as wanting to see their wives but I will say the part that’s problematic is that that is the only role given to women in the movie, basically, is to be the objects of the frustrated desire of their husbands. So you have all these appearances of who I call them… Let’s call her Ghost Abigail Adams, who communicates in this spectral form to her husband to try to denote the fact that they were sending letters back and forth.

0:09:37.2 Tim Sandefur: And we know now that they had this very close and really working relationship, he would ask for advice on matters of policy and politics from her, they were intellectual equals, and so she’s often referred to today as one of the founding mothers of America because of her role, advising John Adams, but the movie dumbs her down. For example, there’s this whole early scene where he scolds her for wanting pins instead of making saltpetre, which is based on something… Historically, there are some letters from Abigail Adams, where she writes in 1775, ‘Not one pin is to be purchased for love nor money.’ And then a year later, she writes him and says, ‘You inquire whether I’m making saltpetre, I have not yet attempted it, but after soapmaking, believe I shall make the experiment.’ So what the film writers did was they mashed the two together and turned it into this dumb housewife kind of trope, instead of what it really is, which is her commenting on a supply shortage. Their supply chain is messed up in 1775, and then a year later, she is experimenting with making gunpowder because it’s useful for the war effort. This is not a silly woman, this is a sober intellectual peer that Adams, John Adams treated as such. And so there’s a really… The layer of gender here is really disappointing in how these women are portrayed.

0:11:02.4 Paul Matzko: I wonder how much of that reflects the state of knowledge at the time. This movie came out in ’69, right? Somewhere around there. And a lot of historiography has been done between then and now, and I wonder if scholars have just paid a lot more attention to the role of women at that time since then, and so that if it were written now, it would have a different quality to it.

0:11:22.0 Tim Sandefur: I think that’s right. And that also applies to Jefferson and Sally Hemings, which now, you would have to talk about that if you remade this movie today, the fact Thomas Jefferson likely had relations and children with one of his enslaved… With one of his black female slaves.

0:11:37.2 Paul Matzko: Although that occurred after. That would have been six or seven years after.

0:11:40.4 Tim Sandefur: Oh yes, that occurs after but it would feel weird to do this thing with his love story with his wife and not bring that up at some point. As film-​making, not as an actual act of history. So yeah, you’re right, there’s a bunch of stuff that historiography has done since the 1960s when this was written.

0:12:00.8 David Boaz: I don’t really agree with this. This is a film about two months of moving toward independence and writing the Declaration of Independence, and the fact is, there were only… What was it? 50 people involved in that process. It’s a secret process, there are no women in the room, there are a couple of helpers, like the secretary. So if you made a movie about Thomas Jefferson, then sure, that would be different. If you make a movie about John Adams, as people have done, Abigail is a big player but in this movie, this is about the man as it was, who decided to move to independence and ratify or read, edit and confirm the Declaration of Independence. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable that that’s who we see on screen.

0:12:53.6 Landry Ayres: I don’t think it’s unreasonable because it is… As you said, it is a story about a specific set of time, David, I do think that. I wonder what it would be like if you made that film now, knowing that what went on behind the closed doors in the sessions did not exist in a vacuum, while the story might.

0:13:16.9 Paul Matzko: Well, we know the answer to that in a sense, because we have the HBO John Adams miniseries, which portrays Abigail in a great… Now, of course, that is a movie about John Adams, like David was saying, compared to this, but I really like how that captures… And honestly, I like the way 1776 captures the relationship between John and Abigail, which is of course one of the great love stories in American history. And as you said, Abigail is such a truly outstanding remarkable American woman.

0:13:45.1 Landry Ayres: It is interesting though, this discussion, because just this year, just a few months ago, the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University staged this as a revival, and it’s actually, I believe, off-​Broadway now or very soon and then going to be on a national tour. And they made slight dramaturgical changes to the script, not by removing anything, but by including a few extra historical bits of text, including the letter between Abigail and John Adams, where she urges John to remember the ladies, and emphasise that specific point that Paul was mentioning, as well as, I believe, portraying, without dialogue, but specifically calling out in the playbill the depiction of Robert Hemings and some of the people that were tied to Thomas Jefferson as a person. And it doesn’t call attention to it or change the story in any way but it does simply by including them in the depiction of it attempt to make you look at these discussions in a new light. And that really is the aim of that production in general because they did the very important, and I think, interesting dramatic choice to do something like what Hamilton did historically.

0:15:13.4 Landry Ayres: So almost everyone in the cast is female, or non-​binary, or transgender, many of them are actors of color, and without changing any of the text or doing it to mock these men, they represent them as the script does. It is simply on the audience to then re-​evaluate what this text and the text that the founding fathers created and crafted means when viewed through this different lens. And to me that was interesting ’cause it made me start thinking about other depictions of these people. And really, I always catch myself wanting to say ‘depictions of these characters’. And in a sense, that is what it is, is we have national memory and characters we have invented of who the founding fathers are, and when they are depicted on stage or screen, there is a blurring of the line, even with historical texts, to ground it in reality between those two. So what do you make of the choices in 1776 versus other depictions of this period in… While Hamilton doesn’t necessarily tackle this select few years, it takes on a period after that, but there is a lot of overlap in the characters that are represented in this period.

0:16:45.4 Tim Sandefur: The comparison to Hamilton is instructive, because while Hamilton did the more… Had the casting decisions… There’s no black actors in 1776, in the movie version, the older version. And of course, Hamilton went with a nearly all black and Latino cast, the funny thing is that Hamilton is a much more conservative portrayal, I don’t mean that necessarily in the political sense, but in the sense that it’s a traditional view of the founding fathers as these kind of men set up on a pedestal. It has a hagiographical view of Alexander Hamilton himself, as it ramps up his actual abolitionism, which was pretty minimal. It turns him into a hero, it’s based on Ron Chernow’s biography, it’s a very conservative take on the founding fathers, whereas 1776 is far more radical in a number of ways. So it’s the ’60s into the early ’70s when the movie comes out, they’re concerned about the Vietnam War, so they put in a song where a soldier laments the cost of war, a common soldier. Like history from below, that was really radical, that was going on in the history departments, history from below in the ’60s and ’70s.

0:18:03.5 Tim Sandefur: It put in that big song and dance about rum, molasses, and slaves, which is a very operatic banger of a piece, which, again, it’s in the middle of the civil rights movement. Arguably, they play up the importance of slavery and the debates over the declaration, it is there historically, but they amp that up and make it a bigger deal. Again, far more radical. Whereas Hamilton, by comparison, only briefly mentioned slavery in regards to Thomas Jefferson. When the reality is that, many members of Congress, including Dickinson in this piece, and Rutledge, and so on, and Hamilton himself, we likely know now, owned slaves or were involved in the slave trade in some regard. So it’s funny because Hamilton, despite the colour-​blind casting, if you will, is a far more conservative take on the founders, while 1776 is far more radical.

0:18:57.0 David Boaz: Following on the fact that this was created in the ’60s, maybe the play started in ’69, and then the film in 1972, it’s interesting to know that this was a time… I don’t think they do this much anymore, but when Broadway plays would get presented at the White House because that’s the national stage. And they presented this at the White House, and Nixon did not want the cool, cool considerate men, he didn’t like that. It’s a sort of mocking of Conservatives, although Conservatives in a very different time and place, but still, it’s a mocking of Conservatives. And he pressured Jack Warner to take it out of the film, and the writer and director refused, but unfortunately, it appears the director thought everything was locked down and he went to France on vacation, in a time before email or even easy long-​distance phone calls, and Jack Warner took it out. And Jack Warner also took out some of the salacious bits, the reference to whoring and so on. And it wasn’t until, I think, the 2002 director’s cut that we got this song and choreography back in there. One of the other things there, because I’m always a student of ideology, is the whole song is about moving always to the right, never to the left. And of course, right and left are anachronistic in that sense, they didn’t… The terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ didn’t start being used in our modern sense until the early 19th century, first in Europe.

0:20:41.3 Landry Ayres: Well, I’ll tell you, guys, I can’t compare 1776 to Hamilton ’cause I’ve never seen Hamilton because this is a Jeffersonian household and I will not be out there watching some pro-​Hamiltonian propaganda but I will say that I think the song, the Triangle Trade song that you mentioned, Paul, is the best part of 1776. I like it a great deal because first of all, in the movie it’s beautifully done, really, very passionate. You said ‘operatic’. The whole movie, I think, is operatic, but this particular scene especially, and it’s done with a great deal of passion and emphasis in a way that really, I think, articulates or tries to articulate different perspectives about the revolution as fairly as possible, to try and get why people who we might call detractors from the American revolutionary movement today, what they’re trying to say, and I think that it’s fair to that. And then it’s fair to the players involved and says, ‘One thing at a time, you have to found the nation first and then address these questions later.’

0:21:46.5 Landry Ayres: Now, there are tidbits, you said some historical inaccuracies, there are some big, historic inaccuracies in this movie. I mean Richard Henry Lee did not become Governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson did not resolve to free his slaves, as he says in that scene, things like that that are problematic. And that’s why the term ‘operatic’ is accurate, but I really like the way that it flushes out the problem about slavery in 1776, that it really was just dawning on the civilised world that they were going to have to confront this contradiction and how to approach such a colossal problem, such a colossal evil when we’d all loved to have just wiped it away, but that’s not going to happen. So then what is your next best alternative? I remember a political philosophy friend of mine said something that really stuck with me, ‘You are judged by your second-​best alternative ’cause everybody’s number-​one alternative is utopia, and you’re not gonna get that. So assuming you’re not gonna get utopia, what’s your second best option?’ That’s the question on which we all should be evaluated. In this case, it was liberty, the Declaration of Independence, and addressing the slavery problem with those premises in place.

0:23:01.7 Tim Sandefur: I agree. The molasses, rum, and slaves song is just so good. And again, to the radical-​ness of the moment, it explicitly references sexual assault of slaves, which was not… Even in the 19th century, Mary Chesnut, the famous civil war diarist, it was like an open secret but you didn’t talk about it in public. And even here, a century after that, in the 1960s and ’70s, openly, in a movie musical talk about the fact that slave-​owners took sexual advantage of their slaves, again, a very radical and accurate thing to talk about. That would feel more in keeping with our mores now in the 21st century than in the ’60s and ’70s. And also note too, this point about northern hypocrisy on slavery that is in that song is very well put. I live down the street from an old cotton mill where southern slave-​grown cotton would be shipped all the way up to Maine into this cotton mill and turned into fabric. And so there was a large northern interest in the slave trade and in slave-​based commerce. And there was… Thomas Jefferson is our source for this.

0:24:12.4 Tim Sandefur: We know that a section from the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence that was more explicit about slavery was not in a later draft, it was removed. And Jefferson said it was because of I think Georgia, South Carolina delegates, and he references in some northern representatives as well. So that is based on historical fact. So I agree, that was… My favourite song though, I should say, not because of the depth of the content but just ’cause it’s a real banger of a song is The Lees of Old Virginia, the FFV. Oh, goodness. Which, I do have a little tidbit to add, which is the fountain that they’re going around and around in that song is the fountain from Friends, the TV show. It’s on the same… It’s on a Warner Studios backlot. And so they’re like, ‘Hey, we’ve still got this fountain, let’s put the friends in front of it’, 30 years later or whatever’, which cracks me up.

0:25:10.1 Landry Ayres: Another song that we mentioned briefly but I think, to me is one of the most powerful and stands out from the rest because of who sings it and its subject matter, is Momma Look Sharp, which is the finale to act one in the original stage musical, the song the courier sings. The courier, a role with very little dialogue… Actually, I think no dialogue until that scene at the end of act one, because he simply comes in, slaps a message onto the desk and then leaves and everyone quiets until they hear what goes on. And it’s a great moment of tension, but also a bit of comic relief because he stands in contrast so directly to these men who are generally very moneyed and educated and devoted to philosophy and academics and things like that, and he is a person who travels and is dirty and is doing the hard work that goes along with making sure that those tasks can be accomplished. And when he sits down with the other two figures in the chamber after the hearings have ended for the day and he sings the song that really establishes the stakes for this discussion that says, ‘What is really at risk?’ It is about the people that are dying, it is about the resources that are being lost, and who is on the other side of this conflict.

0:26:58.8 Landry Ayres: And it made me wonder what the purpose within the story that sought beyond just establishing the stakes, is there a point that it’s trying to make by including it only once and saying, ‘Well, you’re distracted with all of this bureaucracy and procedural hemming and hawing, when there are people out here dying.’ Is it mocking it or is it saying, ‘All of this is to serve the purpose of the other thing’? And it made me wonder, is there a way that we could tell the story of the revolution that really balances these two? Because you can’t… There are war movies, you’ve got The Patriot, you’ve got Johnny Tremain, you have all of these very famous stories, and then you have John Adams and 1776 and things about the people who are signing the documents, but rarely, I feel like, do you get stories that cross between the two and show them simultaneously in a fictional sense. So what do you make of the choice when people have to tell the story of choosing between one or the other? Is one more valuable than the other? Is there a way that you can marry the two into one? Is there a better depiction of this period that you think captures really what was going on?

0:28:35.9 David Boaz: I think in two hours, it’s difficult to do everything, and so all of the movies that you cited focus on some particular aspect. I think in this one, despite the rollicking nature and often the humor involved, there is a continuing sense not only that these are serious issues being discussed, the question of whether to be really in their minds the first country ever to declare itself a country and declare independence, and also the problem of slavery in the American colonies or maybe the American country, but we are aware there’s a war going on out there, George Washington keeps reminding us of how bleak it is. And I think I love the scene at the end with everyone signing and the sombre music, but remember, that’s not triumphal music at the end, that’s not like the end of World War II, when everybody’s dancing in the streets, because they know that they have just declared that they are going to fight a war against the greatest power in the world, and that each of them is signing his own death warrant. And so even at the very end, we are told, ‘This is a great moment, this is a heroic moment but it’s the beginning, not the end.’

0:30:12.0 Paul Matzko: Yeah, I think you mentioned the question of blending the stories of soldiers with the political leaders of the time, and it’s true that… Well, there are… I was gonna say there aren’t many movies that do that, but there aren’t really that many American Revolution movies at all, which is pretty unfortunate. The one that I’ve seen that I think is best with regard to the soldier’s experiences, a rather little known movie called April Morning, is based on a novel by Howard Fast, who was a Communist, and so you wouldn’t necessarily expect that it would be a great depiction of the American Revolution, but actually it’s superb. And it’s a little weird in that the idea is that the entire movie takes place in a single day, and the character is a young boy whose father dies, and it uses that parallel as a way of telling the story of the revolution of the Americans growing up and throwing off the mother country and that sort of thing. And it really tells… It’s just about a soldier, and so it does a good job of telling that.

0:31:14.4 Paul Matzko: But I don’t know of many movies that have done a good job in that respect. I’m afraid I don’t like The Patriot very much, the ultra-​violent elements of it just are… Although, Banastre Tarleton really was the butcher, and the movie is based loosely on that, but I do find that problematic. Anybody who’s interested, by the way, in the soldier’s experience of the war really should check out the memoirs of Joseph Plumb Martin. It goes under different titles, the version that I have is titled Private Yankee Doodle, but sometimes it’s also published as The Memoirs of Revolutionary Soldiers. Joseph Plumb Martin wrote a very readable, very enjoyable book in the 1830s, when he was an old man, about his experience during the revolution, he was at almost all of the major battles of the war, so it’s really a fascinating look into the life of the people who were not in high office at the time.

0:32:11.6 Tim Sandefur: I think we also have a reminder. Landry, you were talking about the bureaucratic… There’s a common complaint throughout the movie that Adams is trying to get something done, and all these bureaucrats and nitpickers are in his way, and they’re just obsessed with silly committees over silly nonsense and so on. We have to remember, of course, that this movie is telling us the story through the lens of its own time, and so in the ’60s and ’70s, it’s a moment where there’s this sense of that history is moving along, you have new left and new right radicals springing up saying that the old ways of doing things, the old ways of accomplishing politics are insufficient, so I think that probably informs that sense of frustration with the nitpicky bureaucratic nature of what’s going on there. Whether that’s fair or not, I don’t think so. I think that’s probably a mis-​portrayal of what’s actually going on in the Continental Congress. There’s lots of nitty-​gritty stuff they are doing but I’m not sure that’s a fair complaint. The other thing I’ll note too, this is just a small aside, that’s a reminder that this movie is being written, and the musical is being written in its own moment in time and looking through a certain lens.

0:33:20.9 Tim Sandefur: In one of Abigail Adams’ songs, she references what I think as historians we would call the tri-​faith America concept. She talks about the sisterhood of the Touro Synagogue, the Baptist Sewing Circle, the Holy Christian Sisters of St. Claire, so Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all working together for sake of the revolution, which was a very popular motif in the 1950s and ’60s, in the post-​World War II era. It’s only, we create this idea of Judeo-​Christian society, and it’s invented contra-​totalitarianism, contra-​fascism, contra-​communism. So this idea that what makes America different and special and better than say the Soviet Union or other countries is that we’re religious and we’re religiously diverse, and that all these primary faiths in America have some core similarity and they can have a religious inoculating effect against Godless communism, ’cause there’s no way that… Abigail Adams does not evoke what Will Herberg, the sociologist, in 1955 calls ‘Protestant, Catholic, Jew’. She’s not doing that, but the filmmakers have her do that because again, that’s something that was part of the political project of the 1950s and ’60s, so they’re reading it into the story, even in just a small way in the story of 1776.

0:34:45.8 Paul Matzko: Yeah. It’s true that the John Adams who signed the Alien Act was not exactly a ‘diversity is our strength’ kinda guy.

0:34:52.0 Tim Sandefur: Yeah.

[laughter]

0:34:53.0 Paul Matzko: I’m reminded actually of the art critic, Robert Hughes, was talking about the Statue of Liberty, and he said, ‘Her face says, “Watch it buster”, not, “Welcome stranger“ ‘. And that difference is what you’re talking about there, that we’ve moved in a direction which I think obviously has a great merit, that more of a, ‘Welcome stranger, diversity is our strength’, attitude than the founding fathers had in 1776. They drew from what would be accurately called a diverse background of political, philosophical ideas. These guys were familiar with the Greeks and the Romans and the writings of the French and so forth, which nowadays, that gets all put into a single bucket of white culture, but the reality is that that’s actually radically diverse in time and ethnicity in its origins. Founding fathers talked about these thinkers as if they were friends of theirs, they knew them very deeply, and they all influenced their views of an empire of liberty that was to come after independence. So we should not downplay the degree to which diversity did play into what they were doing, but they were much more concerned with what we would call Republican virtue and individual liberty, than with considerations of that sort that I think you see in Hollywood today.

0:36:12.1 Tim Sandefur: And I suppose I’ll add too, that the movie does a very good job showing the diversity of opinion among the founding fathers, I think sometimes when it’s talked about in high school history classes, that there are the founding fathers, who are pro-​independence, and then there’s loyalists, who are the evil, bad guys who are anti-​independence, and that’s about as complicated as the story gets. But in here, it shows that within, that it’s a much more fluid situation, that being for independence opened questions like, ‘Well, at what point, and how do you get to independence? Are you willing to entertain offensive military action?’ There’s a whole range of views represented in the film, which I think is useful to Americans who might have had a pretty simplistic view of that.

0:37:04.5 Paul Matzko: And in that respect, it’s far superior to the HBO John Adams series. One thing that… The John Adams series on HBO I think is the best movie ever made about the American Revolution but I have real problems with it. One of them being, we are never given an explanation of why John Adams wants independence in that movie. The one moment when he has the opportunity to stand up in front of people and say why does he want independence? He gives a speech where the line is, ‘I want a country, within my lifetime, let me have a country’, is what he says. Well, any fascist wants a country of his own. ‘A country of our own’ is the favourite slogan of fascists. What John Adams wanted was not a country of his own, what he wanted was, as the other founders wanted, a country founded on principles of individual liberty, that would respect individual rights. And 1776 does a far superior job of discussing those issues by talking about things like, ‘The way the British burned our towns, destroyed the lives of our people’, and the other things that are mentioned in the declaration.

0:38:12.0 David Boaz: Speaking of people having to come to the support for independence and why, let me mention one of my pet peeves in the movie, which is the portrayal of James Wilson, because in the first place, he wasn’t a judge at the time. We remember him actually as Judge Wilson, but he had not been a judge by 1776, but also he was not undecided and he was not simply in the shadow of John Dickinson, he was pro-​independence. What they did there is kind of merge another Pennsylvania delegate who was undecided into James Wilson, but he’s called James Wilson, whose name is much better known than the other delegate, even though not as well known as the really well-​known founders. And so I just always feel sorry for James Wilson and his descendants when I see him portrayed as such a dishrag and a person who prefers to be a nonentity. This was after all a person who was named to the supreme court of the new nation.

0:39:17.2 Paul Matzko: I could not agree more. James Wilson was one of the most important of America’s founding fathers, and it’s really a disgrace how much he is ignored, he was a signer of the declaration and of the constitution and he was one of the greatest legal thinkers in early America. He wrote a series of lectures on law, which you can get through a Liberty fund nowadays, which are just brilliant analyses of, well, not just legal issues in general, but of the constitutional and political structure of the United States. And second only to James Madison, and maybe in some respects superior to James Madison in his understanding of the nature of the constitutional union. So it’s really a shame that Wilson doesn’t get the kind of attention he deserves, he should be at the top level of our hierarchy of founders alongside James Madison.

0:40:08.5 Tim Sandefur: I’ll also do a shoutout to John Dickinson, who they kinda do dirty in the portrayal as well. Dickinson, they referenced this at the end, he does fight bravely in the revolutionary army. He’s never particularly trusted. Other people get promoted over him because of his refusal to sign and to… But here’s the thing, the reason why he was opposed at that point was not that he was against independence per se, but he was against offensive military operations at the time. He comes from a Quaker background, and so he comes from a pacifist group, which makes his service in the revolutionary army interesting, but he’s a man of conscience, and one of the… This is part of what you do in the movies, you get good guys and bad guys. I’m not sure in the Declaration of Independence debates that any… There are a few figures who I think of as being bad guys in the sense that they’re insincere, that they are just there for personal interest or… Here, the bad guys are all kind of effete a little bit, they’re punctilious, they’re not down-​to-​earth men or the people you have a beer with like Franklin or Adams, and that’s just… These are men generally of the same social class. There’s not some big social divide between the pro-​independence side versus the not-​independence-​now side, which I think would be the more accurate way to portray them.

0:41:33.1 David Boaz: I think actually the movie does do a good job though of allowing Dickinson to sharply debate with Adams over a real issue. We’re part of the freest country in the world, the freest empire in the world, why would we wanna give that up? And that is a real argument, which, it’s tough for modern viewers to recognise because we all know the forward progress of the world was that America should be independent. So that big debate, I think they do have a real clash, and then obviously in the slavery debate, they do let Rutledge make a case for why he’s not willing to subordinate his peculiar institution, which I think is actually another anachronistic phrase that probably had not been used by 1776.

0:42:30.7 Paul Matzko: Yeah, if Dickinson had been a bad guy, Thomas Jefferson would not have been friends with him, and late in his life, Jefferson spoke very highly of Dickinson, and so it was not as severe a clash as is portrayed either in that or in the HBO series, which is, both of them, I think are kind of fair to Dickinson, in that they try to show that he’s coming from a good place, and it’s not just the Quaker background, it’s also… This was a century after the English civil wars had… The Glorious Revolution or before that, the English Civil War. And so English political society had been through a great civil-​war catastrophe, where issues of natural law and individual freedom had already been brooded about, and those had failed. They were regarded… Or I mean, not the Glorious Revolution, but the Civil War was regarded as a great catastrophe, as proof that the people could not govern themselves without kings. And now here you are, 130 or so years later, trying to do it all over again, and it’s natural that at least somebody in the room would be saying, ‘Well, what about… Who’s gonna be our Cromwell?’ And it’s natural that people would be worried about that, and so I think they do a fairly good job of trying to explain that, but then you get into I think a depth that the story could get distracting, so they don’t do too much of that.

0:43:55.3 Tim Sandefur: We’re asking a lot of them. Well, and Dickinson, he, to your point…

0:43:56.9 Paul Matzko: Yeah. We’re nerds. We’re American Revolution nerds, of course.

[laughter]

0:44:02.4 Tim Sandefur: Well, and he had spent three years over in Britain a decade or so earlier, which means only a decade or two while he’s over there from the Jacobite uprisings in the 1740s, which was all about natural law, the rhetoric. So he’s alarmed, he’s like, ‘I’ve seen the harm that comes from people overturning useful institutions on the whim and quickly resorting to violence.’ So yeah, you have to situate them in their place and time.

0:44:32.9 Paul Matzko: Yeah, the whole exercise is one of taking what are at their core radical political ideas, but then making them work as a matter of practical politics through practical statesmanship, which I think you said earlier, it can seem like a bunch of piddling details and slow, obnoxious committee meetings and so forth, and having that patience for that, it can be very difficult, but what the revolution shows, what the experience of Philadelphia shows is that that’s the only way to make a lasting change, is those kinds of step-​by-​step, baby-​step transformations to get, as I think Adams later said, get 13 clocks to strike at the same time, which was a much more difficult thing to do in the 1770s than with our clocks today. Nowaday, everybody’s clocks goes off at the same time. Every time there’s an AMBER alert, everybody’s cell phone in the room goes off simultaneously. That was not the case in Philadelphia in 1776.

0:45:35.7 Tim Sandefur: Though we do open with a clock… Or not. We have the Liberty Bell at the opening, which is as always anachronistic because the Liberty Bell was not a big… The symbol it is now of the American independence until the 1830s. And basically, abolitionists in the 1830s say, ‘Oh, we found this bell, it’s got a crack in it. That’s a good story. We can tell the story that it cracked because of the incompleteness of the declaration, it didn’t secure… The revolution didn’t secure freedom for all.’ And so they created this story a generation later that made the Liberty Bell central to the 1776 story. When it’s not, really, it’s just one of the bells that rang.

0:46:17.3 Paul Matzko: While we’re on the point of symbolism, one of the things that I find charming about 1776 is the discussion over whether it should be the eagle, the dove, or the turkey, that is the national symbol. And Franklin wants it to be the turkey. Now, this is based loosely on a real exchange that happened kinda, but Franklin wants it to be the turkey because the turkey is a brave bird that will attack an entire regiment by himself, and also is a productive bird, it’s a meal that the pilgrims lived off of and so forth, and it’s native to America. And Adams wants it to be the eagle. And Franklin points out that the eagle is a scavenger and a coward. And every time I see an eagle, I think about that. I think, ‘The turkey is not a beautiful animal, I’ll give you that, and not a particularly smart animal, I’ll give you that, but Franklin makes a good case, I think, that it should be the turkey.’

0:47:18.7 Landry Ayres: If anything, it is delicious though. And if there’s one thing I want us to be, it’s delicious.

[laughter]

0:47:25.5 Tim Sandefur: Apparently, that whole… That little bit, that little discussion over, ‘What should the bird be?’ Which is fun, was based on some graphic designer, came up with a movie poster showing an eagle breaking out of an egg. And they liked the poster so much for the musical that when they made the movie, they added that in. That’s what I read.

0:47:44.9 Paul Matzko: Oh my. That’s fantastic.

0:47:47.5 Tim Sandefur: That scene is because of a poster showing an egg breaking out, which is just fun.

0:47:51.4 Paul Matzko: Well, early on, Jefferson wanted the symbol… They came up with different ideas for the symbol, the national seal and so forth. And Jefferson wanted to use the slogan, ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God’, which was rejected, so he used it as his own personal motto after that, but he wanted a mosaic symbol, and Moses was really one of the central motifs of the designs and the thinking about the revolution at the time. Now, you were talking about the Judeo-​Christian thing being an artefact of the mid 20th century. And that sort of is true but it is also true that when in casting about for symbolic representations or myths to appeal to to articulate their cause, the revolutionary founders very frequently went back to Moses as their symbol, who was leading the people from bondage into a new land. And that representation really was important to them.

0:48:56.5 Tim Sandefur: Yeah. We’re getting to the complicated territory of religion and the founding… John Witherspoon is in here, he’s a Presbyterian clergyman, who would we recognisably… We get into the idea that basically every generation of religious Americans goes back and mines that moment for evidence that their version of religion was vitally important to the revolution and to the founding of America, to varying degrees of accuracy. For example, back when I was in high school, grew up in a very conservative circle, we would go on… I went on a high school tour of the US capitol, with a guy named David Barton, who’s a Christian nationalist, and he would go around and show all the mosaic lawgiver motifs that are all over the place in the supreme court chambers and in the capitol building, you see Moses and the tablets and be like, ‘See, the founding fathers were evangelical Christians just like us.’

0:49:52.7 Tim Sandefur: And so every generation does that, but there is a kernel there. There really were deeply religious founders, there were less deeply religious founders like Thomas Jefferson, famously clipping out sections of the Bible that he didn’t approve of, though very religious in his own way. I guess we’d tell you, we would say spiritual, but not religious. But it was the difference between a civic religion, the importance of religion as a store of civic virtue for the people, as opposed to the ideas of religion of the mid 20th century, the Judeo-​Christian, Protestant, Catholic, Jew consensus, or that of Judeo-​Christian rhetoric today, which tends to be very new Christian-​right inflected, more conservative and evangelical in orientation.

0:50:37.4 Paul Matzko: And you were talking about how independence… One of the reasons why you might be afraid of independence in 1776, about, what does the future hold? Was, there’s problems against the British, but there’s also mutual squabbling among the colonies and everything. There’s also this question of religious diversity. You were talking about diversity earlier. Diversity could be a weakness. If you were there in the summer of 1776, you’re thinking, ‘Well, what about… We got Catholics in Maryland, we got the Quakers in Pennsylvania, we got the Puritans in Boston, how are these people going to all get along on the North American continent?’ And so they… I’ll emphasise what they have in common, but you know they also have a lot that they disagree about. And the Quakers particularly were a problem I think for a lot of the American founders. George Washington, for instance, wrote a letter to a Quaker congregation where he said… I don’t remember the exact words, but something to the effect that Quakers, except for their refusal to fight for their country are good Americans. That’s really quite startling. And Madison said something similar to that, that… So these were real problems, how to handle diversity in a free society without having that diversity rise to such a level where it destroys the institutions on which individual freedom depend.

0:52:00.3 Tim Sandefur: Well, and there’s a big debate after, not in the declaration, but debates over the constitutional ratification on the state level, and then debates over the state constitutions as well, there’s a whole series of debates over the next generation really over whether or not to put religious test clauses in various constitutions. In other words, should you have to believe in a higher being in order to be qualified for office or even to vote, and if so, which higher being? So there’s a whole series of religious test-​clause debates that mostly go down to defeat because of changing cultural norms around religion late 18th century. Thomas Jefferson’s a great example. Thomas Jefferson creates a kind of, almost an ideological alliance. Despite being a free thinker in religious terms, he and Baptists like John Leland and Isaac Backus, this occasions the famous giant wheel of cheese that someone gives to him during his presidential campaign, his relationship with this community but basically, you have these evangelicals and freethinkers uniting around the idea that you shouldn’t have religious test clauses, that you should have… Essentially, we should avoid codifying religious particular-​realism. I’m not saying that right. Particularism and religious establishment, the anti-​establishmentarian or disestablishment. So religious pluralism is an ongoing debate in the 1770 and 1780s.

0:53:26.1 Paul Matzko: And this is happening… Remember, 1776 was also the year that the Virginia Declaration of Rights came out, only a month before the Declaration of Independence. And on the committee to write that Declaration of Rights was George Mason and James Madison. Madison was what? 25 or something, he’s this young college intern, basically.

0:53:44.1 Tim Sandefur: He’s young. Yeah.

0:53:47.3 Paul Matzko: Serving on this committee with George Mason, one of the most respected politicians in America. And Mason had written in his draft that religious toleration is… Everybody should have religious toleration. And Madison speaks up and says, ‘No, it’s not toleration, because toleration implies that the government is allowing you to do something, everybody has a fundamental right to religious liberty.’ And that transformation was a major one, that’s something that Paine and Washington and others remark upon in their letters, that the change from coloration to liberty is a deep philosophical, fundamental change that’s going on simultaneously with the Declaration of Independence. Well, will that lead to a flourishing society or will people then fall into warring with each other?

0:54:31.4 Paul Matzko: That debate then goes on for another six or seven years in Virginia, where Jefferson’s bill for religious freedom takes a decade to get passed because of the opposition of people like Patrick Henry who say, ‘Well, you have to force people to support churches because if you don’t, then you’ll have immorality and society will collapse.’ And Madison and his allies who are principally Baptists, as you said, because they were the persecuted minority in Virginia, are standing up and saying, ‘No, we have a right to freedom of conscience’, and that tension actually never really gets resolved during the lifetimes of the people who are in 1776. It’s for the next generation to resolve that question. Well, if it’s been resolved.

0:55:10.9 Tim Sandefur: If it’s been resolved at all. Yeah. And there’s this way in which the movie I think goes to in broader terms, the movie I think is a very radical film in the sense in its interpretation of what’s happening in 1776. As opposed to I think a common portrayal of what happened at the declaration because of things like The 1619 Project and so on, which emphasises the conservativeness of the declaration. This movie plays up I think the liberatory potential, it notes that the slavery section gets cut out in that banger of a song but it teases the possibility, emphasises that there was an almost not-​yet aspect of, abolitionist aspect, if you will, to the declaration, in terms of the soldier, it has an anti-​war motif, the soldiers song, and a number of other points.

0:56:08.5 Tim Sandefur: It is a relatively radical portrayal of the possibility of liberty, the seed of liberty that gets planted in the declaration, which again goes contrary to a lot of the current interpretation, which says instead, ‘No, that the declaration and later the constitution are pro-​slavery documents, they are about protecting the property of wealthy landowners. It’s actually anti-​radical. It is a conservative document, a conservative moment.’ So one of the things I like about this film is that it recaptures this idea. You mentioned Empire of Liberty, the title of Gordon Wood’s book about the early republic, it captures that sense of possibility and real liberty that gets enshrined in the declaration and in the constitution.

0:56:54.3 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @popnlockepod. That’s ‘pop’, the letter ‘N’, Locke with an ‘E’ like the philosopher, ‘pod’. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favourite show or movie next time.